As for why we switched, aluminium is very common on earth. There's tons of it! but most of it is tied up in unusable forms that were very difficult to separate out for most of history, so it was exceptionally rare. Silver was comparably much cheaper and easier to get.
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Eventually in the mid-19th century developments in chemical processing made it possible to produce aluminium in mass amounts, and with further developments it only got better.
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that's why you can buy a can of soda in a 1$ aluminium can today: it's cheap and common. And aluminium works about as well as silver for mirror-backings, so naturally it's used instead. A vacuum-sputtering method is used to create a very thin later of pure reflective aluminium
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So if you look up big telescopes, you'll find that even their mirrors are made this way! The Hubble uses a 3 millionths of an inch thick aluminium layer, with an additional magnesium fluoride layer for protection (and UV reflectivity)
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so if the assumption that vampires don't appear in mirrors is due to the silver backing, the hubble could see vampires just fine.
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so I reject this original idea. Vampires can be seen in modern telescopes, and if space was full of vampires, we'd know.
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BTW, a scene that'd be fun to put in your next vampire story: Your vampire is born/turned in the 19th century or earlier, when all mirrors are silver-backed. They don't appear in mirrors, and when film is invented, they don't appear in that either.
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then after WW2 (when aluminium production really ramped up) all new mirrors start being aluminium-backed, and suddenly they DO appear. That's gonna give them one hell of a shock the first time they see themselves after a century or more!
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and then around the end of the 20th century, everyone starts using digital cameras instead of film cameras. No silver halide crystals, just photosensitive silicon, lenses, and (aluminium) mirrors. So they start appearing in pictures too.
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extra credit: figure out a mythological explanation for why your vampires are vulnerable to aluminium too, so they can continue to not appear in mirrors. I don't know how you're gonna get around the digital camera thing, though.
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Silver was holy when the world was Christian. Now the world worships profit and 'free' market and so aluminum has become holy (as well as pixels). These are dieties of different industries perhaps. Do I get a half point?
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